Information "experts"
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- Seph
-They have excellent degrees in irrelevent subjects such as Geology or Accountancy.
-They work for corporate droid companies or government institutions.
-They have a maximum of 2 creative brainscells.
- They went for the job because they "like the internet" and the MD plays tennis at the same club
- They wait until you have completed 95 % of the project before they realise they have a job to do.
- They are paid to make uninformed and fundamnetally floored decisions about any body of work that has not been completed by themselves. Such as restructuring of main menu, adding of back buttons, and thousands of hyperlinks (they adore hyperlinks).
- They send the same 20 MB email of a powerpoint document, at least twice. And the powerpoint document contains a rainbow of coloured text and bad quality bitmaps.
Please Mr Information "expert" put down your fat book on "The theory of information" and go and do something that you have experience in like Biochemistry. that way you wont spend the rest of your life making other peoples lives a misery and turning potentially good, well organised multimedia projects into a shit, poorly structured, multicoloured, multilinked, multibollocked, misinformed waste of time.
ok I feel loads better now.
- Redmond0
Yeah I hate when that happens too. Or they screw-up the whole text formating and it ends-up so disorganized that you just don't know what to do (ie what they really want) when they tell you to fix it.
- unknown0
fuckin Amen to that!
- Seph0
beware of anyone with following job titles
functionality Analyst
communications manager
infrastructure manager
integration architect
Information specialistfind many more bullshit job titles here:
http://www.bullshitjob.com/titleā¦
- vena0
what about staticians?
- unknown0
they're _probably_ ok ;)
- sexypixel0
staticians are good at reading web logs
- Seph0
Isnt it statiticians not staticians?
Never met one myself, but they more than likely good at giving opinions that lack real-life-practicle-experience.
- sexypixel0
woooh spelling bee, is it?
- Seph0
I was actually just wondering because I thought it was statitician but seeing as everyone was using statician..... anyway Im not arsed enough to look it up.
go and sex up some pixels and leave me alone.
- sparker0
and designers are more qualified to make decisions about "real-life-practicle-experiences...
seems like a nieve and ignorant assumption if you ask me. just because you may not understand the usefullness of a particular station in the industry doesn't mean you're right about it's lack of creditability.
i've known many designers who can't logicially think their way through a project and rely on what they determine to be the best solution for the product and it usually ends up being a failure in communication and a failure for the client.
but, i guess it's ok for designers to make useless, quasi-creative descisions and produce useless fluff...since that's all most can do anyway.
praise be ignorance.
- Seph0
watch out !! Sparker is an information expert !!!
- sparker0
no, i'm a dot.com bullshit conceptualist.
:)
i'm just saying, that the rant could go both ways.
i know a lot of so-called usability 'experts' who can't actually think their way out of a wet-paper sack...i just think that ranting about it like all information specialists are worthless is dumb, mate...because anyone could make the same argument about a graphic designer or creative.
- unknown0
It's great when they move sociologists into the realm of the web, they're great for understanding the dynamics of web communities such as this. :)
Sparker-you make some good points. I majored in Advertising in college, focused on creative and interactive work. When I'd be in graphics classes or doing indipendant study stuff with Flash, I'd see these students that were the straight Fine Arts path, that couldn't rationalize a single decision about their design. No focus on what their work was about really other than the look of it.
I'm not saying that everything has to have some huge theme behind it, but I saw too many people lost in what they were doing.
I would always reccomend taking some courses in Advertising if you're studying graphic design. Not advertising graphic courses, but communication courses, courses that deal with marketing, branding, legal aspects, etc. Gives you quite a nice perspective on what you're creating in that you start to see how it's going to relate to people, how it's going to be perceived.
CreateOnline had an article about this in one of their first issues, about how web design firms were looking for designers with advertising degrees and backgrounds because they had a much different perspective on the work as opposed to flying around through Photoshop doing what they were told to do by someone else.
disclaimer: don't worry, this isn't a must. there's plenty of stuff out there that is excellent by people who didn't study a second of advertising :) but it is helpful.
- Seph0
Sparker, fair point I suppose, I agree that many designers, web and grafic can sometimes lose sight of what they are doing, getting the right balance of considerations between grafics and userbility/navigation is a skill. Good design is the art of balancing all these things.
So when an information "expert" comes along after the project has been designed and orders changes, if after the changes you have a better prduct it is likely you have a bad designer not a good information "expert"
It is a different matter if the information "expert" analyses all the content in a project BEFORE the project is designed, that way he can be of some help in suggesting the best way to organise the information and nav.
Anyway I was only ranting really because Ive got this brainless scientist who claims to be a didactic expert who has fucked up my CDrom with his changes.
- sparker0
in that case, kick him the nuts and tell him to sit down.
:)
- Seph0
LOL !
I would if I could find them !
he's hid them in a hyperlink somwhere.
- sparker0
lol
- Redmond0
Furthermore, I'm amazed people that went to unviersity, I hardly made it to college, can make so many dumb grammatical mistakes and make something so disorganized. A thesis should be clean and legible uncluttered with multi-colored junk, why should a web page or a menu for a serious company be basicaly any different.
- unknown0
exactly, Redmond.
I'm not throwing a plug for Flashkit, but I've been a moderator there for about three years now. No telling how many sites I've reviewed in that time.
I can't tell you how many were a single person's masquerade as a "web design firm" or "Design Studio" and such, trying to look much more corporate or serious than what it actually would be-one person doing freelance work.
I've seen so many sites filled with typos, poor grammer, bad design elements (set of buttons in Flash that don't align because they don't know what the Align tool is, or buttons using only the text as button and not a full shape over the top...crap like that).
You see these efforts, and you can't help but think, "This person's site isn't 100%, they can't show total perfection with regard to such simple things as correct spelling and grammer, and they expect me to trust them with my money and my web site?"
I think you know what I mean. When a professor in college told us to consider yourself out of the running for a job if your resume has even one word misspelled, plenty of people took that to heart. I figure, why not apply the same focus to everything else that communicates anything about you.